A strange and little known fact about me is that I sleep walk during the night, a lot. People would probably find it disturbing to wake up at the fridge in the middle of the night drinking milk. For me this has been a weekly occurrence for as long as I remember. The upside is that I generally don't remember middle of the night or letting the dog out at 5am.

I'm in Chicago this week. I wouldn't call this the greatest beer city in the world, but I've had some wonderful Goose Island Seasonal on draft and was very excited to find fresh New Belgium Fat Tire.

I mentioned on my other blog my recent trip to Colorado last year for GABF. The highlight of our trip was a 5 hour VIP tour at New Belgium Brewing with JR, one of their Cellar Men. JR generously spent the afternoon sharing his journey in brewing and his experiences working for New Belgium. Of course the beer is wonderful, but perhaps the most fantastic take away was the Brand Evangelism surrounding their company and their community. 'To create a profitable business in which our love and talents manifest' is lovingly tiled at the top of the large Merlin brewing kettle. It's a sentiment that I can't stop thinking about.

Owning a marketing strategy, technology and design firm, Silverscape in Boston means trying to find the balance between the art of design, technological solutions and profitability. It is said, that as the economy goes south, the profitability and sales for stress reduction products, beer for example, go up. This doesn't surprise me.

At Silverscape, we recently completed the getting to know you process and have begun work with a new client Taza Chocolate in Somerville MA. What we've realized in our discussions with Taza is the power of creating a full life cycle hand-crafted experience. As artisans, we have much in common. For Taza, it's Chocolate, for Silverscape our output of love and talent is marketing solutions for our clients including large enterprise-class websites. Our service solutions are crafted by an entirely in-house team. Just as our new friends who create a bean-to-bar sensory experience, we deliver full branding and sales solutions though engagements but our goal is just the same to engage and delight.

I'm so excited for our new Silverscape site. One of the whiz-bang innovations will be a community blog. A blog, by general definition is the musings of one writer. Occasionally, a blog will be the thoughts of four to five writers but generally not more than that. But how does a whole community, team or company blog as a common voice? We're developing a new Adobe Air application. Through this technology our entire team will have the ability to easily blog small bits of what we're working on in real-time thus bringing our clients and prospects closer to what we're developing. You might be thinking that you'd never let your company have a fully democratic blog for worries that someone might say the wrong thing.

Our solution allows our team to, as a group, select posts that we as a group do not feel entirely reflect the company's goals and spirit. This is a new paradigm in inbound/outbound communication with clients. For too long websites have been about having an online brochure, job posting board and tomb stone or news announcement device. 'We're pleased to announce this new client; we're pleased to announce the culmination of a project with client B.' Snore.

There's a lot of writing and thinking about what web 2.0 is and will be. Now, our site visitors will have a very easy way to comment, query and interact with our team members who are directly shaping the vision and execution of our client marketing strategies. Our goal is to create a convenient way for our whole company, our prospects, our suppliers and our clients to interact and have meaningful discussions on what we're working on in real-time and while ideas and challenges are being attacked head on.

Creating brand evangelists requires a two way conversation. We're looking forward to learning more from the outside world and having more meaningful conversations. Most corporate websites barely achieve sleep walking.

Sleep walking is dangerous. Sometimes you don't discover the milk is sour until you're already drinking it.